One of my favorite plant based processes in slow fashion & textile art is painting and print making. I work with a variation of a centuries old “oak gall ink” recipe that is made of oak galls and iron salts.
This process starts with making an ink using iron salts, vinegar, and a thickener. The curing of ink requires two baths, one of which I use gallo tannins. This plant extract is from gall nuts or oak galls, which are fibrous growths on oak trees that the tree creates once a wasp has laid its eggs on a branch. The wasp later drills itself out of the gall and flies away. The galls can be gathered and used for their tannins as a mordant or dye bath and has been used in inks for at least 1500 years across Europe.
The ink’s magic is in it’s ability to fuse with the substrate and to be quite permanent. Leonardo Da Vinci used the same ingredients for his drawings and writings, among most of Europes scribes and artists.
Below are some examples of how an iron ink, printed onto cotton, will react when being either dipped in a tannin bath, or bundled with whole dried plants and steamed, to oxidize the iron in interesting ways.
